ReInvention In Cloud- The New Mandate

While the early years of 2000s could really have been about cloud players launching their cloud offerings, mid 2000s till almost about a decade and a half more was really all about “cloud wars”. Each cloud player was competing to get his share of pie, out do the other and establish his market-base as wider as possible.
Enter the early 2012 ish scenario and till date..The era of cloud partners has truly begun in full swing. It really is not so much more about “Cloud Wars” BUT “Cloud Partnerships”- well that’s the flavor going forward.

Looking Back..

In one of my previous posts , “To A Cloud World Ahead, How Cloudy Does it Look Ahead ”, I had vividly described about the rapid progress towards the “as-a-service era” that enterprises are desiring to ramp up towards. In this bandwagon, while abstraction and virtualization are front runners, commoditization and pervasive computing are no less either for IT Practioners.

With stupendous agility and crystal clear business transparency for utilization, achieving higher margins over cloud usage, is a question and challenge for every cloud player. With such demanding scenarios, how do cloud players go the extra mile for the consumer yet meet business demands of growth, revenue and numbers?

The Present Cloud Scene:

In today’s perceptive cloud era, it becomes all the more pertinent for cloud players to really bring more value for all the customers. “Consumerisation of IT” has further forced the new digital age C-Suite to spur innovation, time-to-market and business agility extending business revenues through cloud in ways beyond imagination. While initially all cloud initiatives are taken with a huge “cost” factor in mind to make the move from a CAPEX to a OPEX model, but today every CIO needs to really rethink his strategy in terms of how he can apply the “economics of innovation” to lead the pack amidst the wolverine of cloud offerings and still make his business proposals to his CEO and CFO.

Why Partner – THE POTENTIAL MARKET BASE?

Today Cloud computing technology is mainstream. Most of the enterprises and SMBs have moved beyond the IaaS opportunity and are now is a “cloud re-discovery phase” for their strategic initiatives. In this phase, what enterprises seek are new opportunities with cloud players beyond their infrastructure needs. According to 451 Research LLC titled “Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers” , a Microsoft Corp.-commissioned study , nearly 70% of the opportunity for cloud players today is beyond infrastructure hosting capabilities.

The recent IDC study on hybrid cloud computing forecasts the below:

• By 2017, IT players will actively maneuver their 20% of their IT Budgets to industry clouds to drive greater flexibility, collaboration and information sharing
• By 2017, 20% of IT players will actively channel their activities in community-driven open source standards/frameworks to adopt them strategically.

Strategic partnerships between cloud players can directly drive two results

• Increase the viability and longevity of the cloud offering/product in a technical and business sense
• Open up untapped new channels for innovation and communication
• A great platform for additional, unmeasured (but important) viewing

Innovation : The Key Driver

The Sun is Indeed Out for Cloud. It not just looks promising but also has the tremendous potential when a cloud player goes beyond the norm.

In the early days AWS was the de-facto standard for cloud, but now you have many more. All the leading players viz. Microsoft, AWS, IBM are clocking steady progress in revenue.

With tremendous adoption and enough maturity, today the cloud industry demands sharp business acumen, stamina and discipline to realize profits. So how do the cloud players go beyond the norm?

A well thought out adaptation and strategy will certainly pave the way for partners in the ecosystem to bundle and cross-sell each other’s offerings and also in the process create a “raft of new offerings”.

In the long run it will be critical that cloud players partner with each other to simplify solutions and offerings in the context of customer to not just make them cost effective but also achieve higher sales numbers and margins.

To Conclude..

The only way forward in the cloud era for all cloud players to make the numbers tick would be to bridge the gaps with each other across multiple layers of the datacenter in this rapidly changing technology world and magnificent trends such as IoT, Augemented Reality, Software Defined ‘everything’.

@Mark @Joe : The choice of taking a private, public or hybrid approach is truly applicable depending on the applications and the initiatives being embarked upon.Over a period of time, undeniably CRM, HR and less mission critical applications are the ones that most enterprises have been placing on public cloud whilst the mission critical ones are out their on private majorly and also to some extent on hybrid format. The key message that we are driving through this article is the choice of “hybridness” in terms of unification of players to offer services or product offerings bundled together.

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